Coldstart / Warmstart

[enriquebs]

Could somebody explain the difference between these two traps?

Thanks a lot in advance

[David Stanford]

The technical definitions of coldStart and warmStart are:

A coldStart trap signifies that the sending

protocol entity is reinitializing itself such

that the agent's configuration or the protocol

entity implementation may be altered."

"A warmStart trap signifies that the SNMPv2 entity, acting in an agent role, is reinitializing itself such that its configuration is unaltered."

The key difference in this reinitialization (reload or reboot) is altered versus unaltered.

However basically they are:

coldStart -- The snmp device performs a power on

warmStart -- The snmp device performs a software reload or ipl

[nhabib]

warmStart: "A warmStart trap signifies that the SNMPv2 entity, acting in an agent role, is reinitializing itself such that its configuration is unaltered."

coldStart: "A coldStart trap signifies that the SNMPv2 entity, acting in an agent role, is reinitializing itself and that its configuration may have been altered."

In summary, only difference is that a warmStart implies no SNMP config change.

[nhabib]

warmStart: "A warmStart trap signifies that the SNMPv2 entity, acting in an agent role, is reinitializing itself such that its configuration is unaltered."

coldStart: "A coldStart trap signifies that the SNMPv2 entity, acting in an agent role, is reinitializing itself and that its configuration may have been altered."

In summary, only difference is that a warmStart implies no SNMP config change.

[yjdabear]

Well, I've almost never seen a warmStart trap actually arriving at the NMS end though. It's kinda in the some boat as SYS-2-PS_FAIL, in the sense both usually get generated by Cisco devices very early during OS [re-]initialization (think before Superviser engine initialization) when there's no TCP/IP connectivity, so no syslog/SNMP traps can get delivered to NMS! The only way to find out was by happenstance when sniffing through "show log" on the device itself, after NOC belatedly noticed the device had rebooted through some other symptoms that.